When Jesus showed up, he no longer needed the pool for his healing. 

I had full confidence that Jesus could heal my body. My confidence was rooted not only in Mr. Blind’s story but also in the story in John 5, when Jesus healed a man by the pool of Bethesda. 

When Jesus instructed Mr. Blind to go to the pool of Siloam, he went. The crowd was at the pool of Bethesda, yet Mr. Blind went alone to a pool where healing had never occurred. Sometimes God leads us to go where no one has ever gone and do what no one has ever done to fulfil His purposes. 

I felt perplexed about this verse until recently: “‘Go’, [Jesus] told him, ‘Wash in the pool of Siloam’ (this word means ‘Sent’). So the man went and washed and came home seeing” (John 9:7).  

It disturbed me because of another event that happened in John 5 when Jesus, on His way to the temple, saw a man who had been lame for thirty-eight years. The Bible says, “After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes… His neighbors asked, ‘Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and beg?’ Some claimed that he was. Others said, ‘No, he only looks like him.’ But he himself insisted, ‘I am the man” (John 9:6, 8-9).   

Another man had been lingering near the pool of Bethesda. People believed it was stirred occasionally by an angel of God, and that the first person to take a dip in the pool after it was stirred received healing. You can imagine that the disabled man was eager to get into the pool. This man could never make it in time to the pool because of his disability, yet he remained there, hoping.  

The message here, however, is not about how long the disabled man persevered or how miraculous a dip in the pool was, but rather about how when Jesus showed up, the man didn’t need the pool anymore.  

When I assessed the two pools, I was impressed by what Mr. Blind didn’t do rather than what he did. To the lay man, Bethesda would be the right pool for healing. Had Mr. Blind adopted the herd mentality and disregarded Jesus’ instruction, he would have gone to Bethesda and never received his healing. It would have been the wrong pool.